Lev Grossman - The Magician King - Chapter 26

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CHAPTER 26

The others had stayed out on the beach until dawn, waiting for Quentin and Julia to come back up from the underworld. Finally they’d given up and gone back to their berths aboard the Muntjac, chilled and exhausted, to sleep. When they woke up a few hours later they were relieved, and then overjoyed, to find Quentin and Julia waiting for them on deck. Though the scene they woke up to was a weird one. Julia stood there transformed, newly beautiful and powerful. She radiated an air of peace and triumph. Quentin wasn’t transformed, but something else was going on with him: he was down on his hands and knees for some reason, just staring at the wooden planks of the deck. They had flown up and up and up, until gradually Quentin realized that the weightless feeling he had was of them descending instead, but not the way they had come: they dropped down through wet clinging clouds, and then he saw a little chip of wood below them in the ocean that turned out to be the Muntjac, the water around it glittering with dawn light. The goddess placed them on the deck, kissed Julia on the cheek, and vanished. Quentin found that he couldn’t stand on his own; or he could, but he didn’t want to. He got down on all fours and put the key down in front of him. He looked at the good wooden planks the Muntjac was made of, really looked at them: after a night spent in hell everything was real and vivid and impossibly detailed. Colors looked superbright, even the grays and browns and blacks and the other undistinguished, intermediate noncolors that he ordinarily would have skipped over and ignored. He followed the lines and striations and tiger stripes of the wood, drawn and arranged with careless perfection, dark and light, order and chaos, all mingled together with little splinters along the edges of the boards that had been scuffed up and set at different angles, each one, by the passage of careless feet. He absolutely understood how weird and high-seeming he looked, but he didn’t care. He felt like he could stare at the wood forever. Just this: the good, hardy, noble wood. He was never going to lose this, he thought. He was going to enjoy everything exactly as much, to the atom, as Benedict would have enjoyed it if he could have come back from the underworld. And Alice, and all the rest of them. It was all he could do for them. Earth or Fillory, did it even matter? What was the huge conundrum? Everywhere you looked there was so much richness, you could never exhaust it. Maybe it was all a game, that got crumpled up and thrown away at the end, but while you were here it was real. He pressed his forehead against the deck, hard, like a penitent pilgrim, and felt the beat of the waves transmitted through it from below like a pulse, and the heat of the sun. He smelled the sour salt smell of seawater, and he heard the hesitant footsteps of baffled people gathering around him, unsure of what to do. He heard all the other meaningless noises reality was always cheerfully making to itself, the squeaks and scrapes and thumps and drones, on and on, world without end. He took a deep breath and sat up. Away from the warmth of the goddess’s body he shivered in the early morning ocean air. But even the cold felt good to him. This is life, he kept saying to himself. That was being dead, and this is being alive. That was death, this is life. I will never confuse them again. Then people were hauling him to his feet and guiding him down below to his cabin.